Mi primer viaje sola!

Gandia playa

Well this has been one busy month, feel like I haven’t even stopped! I’m going to skip blogging about my first couple of trips because they were so long ago and as I have just come back from Spain it makes sense to write about that one instead 🙂
So, after my first design exhibition in Brussels (which was so much fun but so tiring!) I had about a week to finalise all my Spanish meetings and book travel etc. The one thing I am really having to get used to and adapt myself to the job is being late. Now anybodyyyyy who knows me, knows I book things so far in advance so I feel organised and ahead of the game. However, booking everything so last minute means I am booking flights literally like 2 or 3 days before I actually go. I amazingly got the last room in the hotel we usually stay at in Spain, and considering this is pretty much THE only hotel in the area, I was pretty fortunate because otherwise it would have been a stay in the carpark. LOL. God that would have been awful ahaha. So, anyway I was given my target of sales for the week and off I went!
The taxi picked me up from home on the Sunday and I headed off to Birmingham airport stressing that the suitcases of designs were going to be too heavy but that there would actually be nothing I could do about it as I can’t exactly throw the work away. Silver lining- the bags were fine. Wahey. Another interesting aspect of me carrying two suitcases of work means I have one small hand luggage bag which can’t go on wheels. Meaning I struggled trying to carry one bag, my handbag and then wheel two bloody heavy cases through the airport. Interesting but do-able for future reference.
I had tried my best to not let myself think that I was going to Spain on my own before I actually got to the airport. Yes, I have travelled before on my own and yes, I have lived abroad on my own but it’s a weird feeling knowing you’re going away and actually have to deliver, and actually have to succeed. Not really much room for failure in a job environment. Fears aside, on the plane I got and put the headphones straight in for some last minute Spanish music practise. In terms of languages, I feel so much more confident now then I ever did at Uni and it’s because I know I’m not being judged if I make a mistake, no one to say ‘tienes que usar el subjuntivo’ -I’m happy talking and knowing I am being understood. I am actually getting to speak loads of French and Spanish, even when I’m at the office in Leicester as I’m always writing emails or ringing customers abroad so it’s pretty cool to be able to talk and no one can understand me in the office itself! Getting myself some brownie points with my colleagues. Plus some of the customers can’t speak English so it really is a bonus that I can speak with them otherwise it would make for an interesting conversation. I have already been hung up on a fair few times by Italians or Germans due to the language barrier!

Anyhow, back to the trip. So I arrived in Alicante Sunday late afternoon and once I picked up my bags (one suitcase handle had snapped off so that was fun) I headed to the car rental place. I signed all the forms and then the guy showed me this monster of a car that I was expected to drive (yes, that is an exaggeration but it was so much bigger than the cars I usually drive excluding the bloody company car but that is another story entirely). I looked at him and just went ‘ayyy que no puedo jajaja’ (‘ahhhh no I can’t!’). He tried to convince me it was easy to park but I didn’t want a car that was easy to park, I wanted a car that I could drive on the wrong side of the road and not be shit scared by it. So, Spanish persuasion skills set right in when I saw my Peugeot 208 chilling next to this beast. Guess what? I got the car, waheyyy. Could not have asked for a better car to drive abroad as I knew the car inside out, knew how the gear box worked (I had major issues with the first rental car I used on the first trip to Spain with my boss in July) and was just generally confident driving it. So, bags heaved into the boot (remember, one 20kg bag had no handle!), air-con and sat nav on, I was off! Now, I was driving along at 80mph, perfectly blue sky, 33 degrees outside and I was in Spain. I actually cheered to myself when I arrived at the hotel!! So blooming chuffed I had done my first abroad drive alone and had experienced no problems. The week went by relatively well with a couple of hiccups along the way which was to be expected. Sat nav is an absolute b*tch (excuse the French) in Spain-I had to sit in the Leicester office for a good 3 or 4 hours programming in the office addresses whilst simultaneously looking them up on google maps on my computer to check I would be in the right place. The problem with being in Valencia is that they also speak the local dialect (very similar to Catalan) and so some of the addresses were in Castillian Spanish, some were in Valenciano and some were just not registered with gps. Fun fun. So my main issue arose with the satnav cos it kept getting me lost and so a few phone conversations were had with the girls on reception of me trying to explain where I was and them trying to tell me where to go: ‘go to the roundabout and take the third exit, then a right and then the second left on the next roundabout…’ Riiiiight. Gut instinct had to set in and amazingly my inner navigation skills worked, absolute shocker!
Before I knew it, my week was over. I had attended all my meetings, made my sales, spoken an awful lot of Spanish and gained confidence in both driving and just being on my own for the entirety of the week. The cherry on the cake was getting to go to the beach and walk along the coast on Wednesday afternoon due to me having finished my meetings for the day. A lot of people imagine my job to be purely like a holiday, and it is in the sense of the travelling part-taxi, plane, car journeys, hotels- but really, I am only seeing Spanish industrial estates and my hotel room! So this made for a nice change and I am hoping to allow myself some time to enjoy being abroad and not just in meeting rooms on future trips!

So, I have been back for a week in the office finalising all my meetings and travel once more for my next trip…on Sunday! This job really is go, go, go and I feel like I don’t have time to fully stop and relax! However, once I am back a week tomorrow I have two weeks in the UK and I plan on making the most of that and not doing much ahah.

Feeling a tad nervous for the next trip as I am setting off from Leicester and crossing the channel on Sunday then have a week of solid driving before getting the overnight ferry from Holland to Hull on Saturday. I am purposefully leaving the details out of this so I can write my next blog within the next couple of weeks 🙂

Hope you’re enjoying reading! Hasta pronto x